4th Court sides with city on sick-pay petition

Jolene Garcia, community organizer for Working Texans for Paid Sick Leave, leads a chant before a City Council meeting in June. The City Council should not enact this ordinance, and if it gets on the ballot in November, voters should reject it.

Photo: Ronald Cortes /Contributor

A three-justice panel from the 4th Court of Appeals late Friday ruled against a group seeking mandatory sick pay in San Antonio.

Attorneys representing the group — Working Texans for Paid Sick Time, a coalition backed by the Texas Organizing Project — on Thursday filed an emergency request asking the court to order City Clerk Leticia Vacek to complete by Monday her work verifying signatures on a petition filed last month.

Members of the group also gathered at City Hall before a council meeting Thursday to implore San Antonio’s elected officials to move forward on the petition, which includes some 140,000 signatures.

The group, who needed to collect nearly 70,000, filed the petition with the city in late May. TOP leaders argued that the City Charter dictates that the city clerk has 20 calendar days to complete her review and that her time expired Wednesday. The city argued that the 20-day reference in the charter is business days, and the clerk has until June 22 to complete the review.

The date matters because if the signatures aren’t certified by June 21, then the council could decline to take action on the matter before Aug. 20 — the state-imposed deadline for calling November elections.

In a confidential letter to City Manager Sheryl Sculley and the City Council, City Attorney Andrew Segovia wrote that the 4th Court had ruled in the city’s favor.

“As we advised yesterday, we filed a response before noon today and the Court considered the filings and determined that the Relator was not entitled to the relief sought,” he wrote. “We anticipate the Relator will seek expedited review by the Texas Supreme Court. We will continue to keep you posted.”

Beth Stevens, the attorney representing Working Texans, said “the court has provided the space for the council to do the right thing” — and call a November election on an ordinance making paid sick leave mandatory in San Antonio.

She said her client would continue to ask the City Council to ensure the election is called.

In the city’s court filing, attorneys argue that Working Texans failed to show that the item wouldn’t make the November ballot, even if certification of the signatures doesn’t occur until Aug. 2, when the council is expected to call a charter-amendment election driven by petitions from the local firefighters union.

Working Texans “has not shown that, even if the petition is not certified to City Council by June 18, 2018, and, even if it is not considered until the City Council’s meeting on August 2, 2018, it will not be placed on the November 2, 2018 ballot,” the city’s filing says. “Relator argues that, because article IV, section 40, of the City Charter then provides City Council with 60 days to decide whether to pass the proposed ordinance or put it on the ballot, that it necessarily will take the full 60 days to make that 13 determination. But that is not so.”

It’s not entirely clear where council members stand on the matter. They’ve discussed mandatory paid sick time in a closed-door meeting, but not in public.

Josh Baugh has covered City Hall for the San Antonio Express-News since 2009. A native of the Alamo City, Baugh was hired as a suburban-cities reporter at his hometown newspaper in 2006. He began his newspaper career at the Denton Record-Chronicle while working on a master's degree in journalism at the University of North Texas and later covered Texas A&M University for The Eagle in College Station. He's covered various facets of government and politics ever since. Baugh has previously written about public housing, county government and transportation for the Express-News.